I appreciate your assessment of the solutions presented like VA, Medicare and Medicaid being awkward, too expensive, and failing in large demonstrable ways. We haven’t had true market based medicine since World War II. Prior to that, it was relatively inexpensive cash and Barter based services. I argue this is the most efficient as it cuts out insurance, pharmacy benefits managers, all levels of administration, and last but not least, all aspects of government regulation compliance and taxation.

In the last six years there have been at least 12 plans on the table to repeal Obamacare. And, there have been six in the last 12 months. There was no sparsity of plans, just no palpable consensus.

I assert that inexpensive primary care, labs, low-end studies, cheap generic medications, will allow for most needs to be met by most people. And expanded health savings account HSA would be used for each citizen to use pretax dollars to buy anything health related from gym memberships to over the counter medications to actual care necessities. Further, inexpensive catastrophic insurance for the big ticket items would be also affordable by most. There could be community, charity, and state programs to provide for the neediest, while keeping the federal government taxation hands to itself.

Unless the Congress and President act soon to repeal Obamacare, just rearranging the deck chairs, will not prevent its fate. Already 19 out of 23 taxpayer-funded co-ops have gone bankrupt taking billions of taxpayer dollars with it. And for the phony federal mandates state exchanges, many have only one high price insurer participating, while still others have none. Leave it to the government to mandate you buy something very expensive and then there’s no opportunity to even comply!

Best wishes for good health,
Craig M. Wax, DO

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Dr. Wax,

The deficiencies of state-sponsored health care are widely known. What is difficult to figure out is an alternative — market-based — that is universally accessible and affordable (with affordability being as elastic as elastic can be), while still offering high quality. If there is a model in this world, I am unaware of it.

All efforts America has made to provide public support for health care since World War II, from the VA system to Medicare and Medicaid to Obamacare, have been awkward and grossly inefficient (if somewhat effective, overall). Unfortunately, blowing these systems up and starting a new system based solely on market forces would be catastrophic in the short term. And since politicians think in the short term, such a radical transformation is impossible.

Today’s Republicans realize there is reward in trashing Obamacare, but they also know that they do not have a better plan to replace it. If they really had a better plan they would have introduced it by now, and it would be on President Donald Trump’s desk for signature. The fact that they cannot agree among themselves on a replacement is testimony to how difficult a problem this is. (This does not excuse the Democrats, either. They’d rather let the Republicans look foolish than offer their own “solutions.”)

The first term paper that I ever wrote was titled “Should Medicare and Medicaid Survive?” and was handed in to my seventh grade teach in the spring of 1967. She gave me a “B” because she did not believe that I had interviewed the local hospital administrator whom I quoted extensively in the term paper.

She also marked me down because in her mind, “our government never takes something away that they have already given away. That is just too hard to do.” Maybe she was right about never taking something away -. She was wrong about the interview with the hospital administrator – he was my Dad…. He ran a 500 bed hospital and he absolutely railed against the involvement of government in healthcare.

Many, many hospital administrators did not want Medicare and Medicaid back then. They knew all too well what would happen – regulation and cost increases year after year…. Isn’t it amazing that our public trusted our physicians and hospitals back in the 1960’s and after decades of increasing governmental regulation and trillions of government expenditures healthcare suddenly fails to meet public expectations? It isn’t amazing that when you add insurance coverage to tens of millions that costs will increase? Not really….

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IP4PI Physicians support the following resolutions for the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the US:

1. The full repeal, nullification or reconciliation of ACA/Obamacare as it was:

A. ACA passed by a partisan Congress (one party) by reconciliation. B. Changed by the executive branch 43 times without appropriate congressional action. C. Changed by SCOTUS to be a tax bill. D. Tax bills must originate in the House and ACA originated in the Senate. E. ACA has changed healthcare from a professional physician-patient interaction into merely an act of government HHS/CMS unelected bureaucratic compliance. F. ACA lead to an uncontrolled rise in costs for all citizens through increased taxes, insurance costs, hospital costs, physician costs, use of narrow networks and severely limited ACA approved options. G. IRS and tax penalties for any American citizens violate the US Constitution. H. Mutually accepted individual customer-vendor purchases are the ideal way to allow personal choice, encourage excellence and establish price competition for best citizen consumer value.Continue reading →

Think about the math; Obamacare cost trillions to save us millions . It has taken over our the healthcare system, insurance system, funneling money to the hospitals and special interests, and stolen everybody’s right to choose to buy or not buy and insurance product. It is the biggest tax increase, biggest taxpayer funded entitlement and biggest theft of out rights in the history of our country. Obamacare Medicaid is not actual care, but a phony entitlement to enslave a population to vote for Washington cartel into perpetuity. I’m no fan of either party and their centralized power and money. We must repeal ACA and change DC now!

Parties and special interests within the US federal government have been trying to passively and actively control the health and welfare of its citizens for a century. With the War Labor Board’s wage and price controls instituted in 1943 during WWII, the US federal government first warped both the employer/employee workplace and healthcare by firmly establishing health insurance as a employee “benefit” in lieu of salary. The premiums were paid with pretax dollars by a combination of the employer and employee.

This gave the employer the power to choose the coverage based on the employer’s needs and wants, not the end user employees needs and wants. This was the first degree of separation.

The insurance premium was used as a bet against the employee getting sick. Today, the insurance companies and other third parties make money by denying the healthcare payment for services, studies, tests and medications. After the insurance company processes healthcare provider claims, they make restrictive and sometimes arbitrary decisions about whether to fund the care, tests and medications. This leaves the patient on the hook for associated costs, despite the insurance premium already paid. This is the second degree of separation. Continue reading →

I’m not really trying to save the country…trying to save the principle upon which the country was founded…Liberty

The Federal Government should be removed from every aspect of interference it has unconstitutionally grabbed in the last 100 years: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Income Tax, Federal Reserve, education funding , litany of Federal Agencies etc. etc., etc.,

Never was there a country on Earth (and there will never be one) with massive central government programs that are not either bankrupt and/or corrupted morally and politically, We indeed see that in our face after 100 years of creeping socialism….